Ohio Super Max Prisoners on Hunger Strike

Ohio Super Max Prisoners on Hunger Strike

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:32:19 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

Ohio Super Max Prisoners on Hunger Strike

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from redbird prison abolition

the ‘terrible alphabet’ of tattooing and scarification

the ‘terrible alphabet’ of tattooing and scarification

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:37:19 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

the ‘terrible alphabet’ of tattooing and scarification

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the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent (Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 72).

found this passage while returning to my notes on tattooing. decided to rewrite this fragment in order to include it as a block quote. rewrite after the jump.

War is not always undertaken by States. This why the magician-king’s greatest illusion is war, which is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick. At various times and places, war been primarily an anti-State force, dissolving them and dispersing power (Clastres, Archaeology of Violence). In fact, the original warrior is an outsider whose knows nothing about ruling the State, only destroying it. Yet war is rarely a whole way of life for these people, but rather the creation connections without the alliances, pacts, and bonds of the State. War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of these people, and it emerges only when their existence collides with their enemy (the State, the city, etc) (ATP: 417). It is rare for Archaic States to have war machines of their own (417-8). To wage war, then, the Archaic State must capture warriors from the outside, which it carefully does from a distance.

The Archaic Sovereign summons its own war machine by mutilating these outsiders, ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (ATP 424-5). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war, but as the price for people to work. Before they are sent to war, the State first gives them a wound that never heals, hurting them until the pain becomes a pleasant reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’:

the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent (Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 72).

The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance, it appears as ‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle: the pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified separation from everything that came before (ATP 424, 426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426).

destruction

destruction

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:33:52 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

destruction

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We are a generation raised on zombie movies. Of the 5,000 ads each one of us saw today, explosions punctuated more than a few.

So how can you blame us when we get a taste for destruction?

We live the revenge-torture films we’ve been spoon fed. I remember the first time I saw a cop break someone’s arm. Let me set the scene: A cloud of pepper spray was slowly settling on us as we ran. From a hill overlooking the street that 80 of us had been marching down moments ago, our coughing and wheezing fused the strange mixture of fear and exhilaration into a single feeling. Suddenly, we saw four cops pounce on one of the stragglers. Tackled, she fell hard. Her howls became part of a single emotion. Like a fine wine, or better yet, expensive perfume, my memories of protest have a distinctive smell composed of many complex notes. And I protest like any good connoisseur, avoiding boring or bland actions, while seeking out every chance to experience a slice of the sublime.

Sure, we come up with excuses or even justifications after the gravity from activist bureaucrats black holes suck us in. A handful of those who call themselves ‘activists’ are even worthy of our forgiveness. They came from families that taught them the virtues of keeping daily planners, following teachers orders, and completing homework on time. But the rest of us long shrugged off the need to find success by following the rules of their game, using their measuring sticks, and following their time-tables.

Leave the counting to the bankers. They seem to invent as much funny money as they need to cover their sloppy accounting, anyway. But, as they say, capitalism succeeded because it was more exciting than everything that came before it; but now we have something more exciting than capitalism itself: its destruction.

Isn’t it about time to enjoy everything they’ve given us?

Archaic State Pt. 7 Escape (from production)

Archaic State Pt. 7 Escape (from production)

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:29:58 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

Archaic State Pt. 7 Escape (from production)

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As a particular orthodox Marxism goes, societies are the result of the type of production going on in that society, which requires proper political economy to know how societies emerge and transform. Scott’s intellectual project, for instance, is centered on this Marxism, even though his work explicitly departs with Marxism. To specify, the picture Scott draws of the anarchic peasant focuses on the anti-State production practices that ‘hill people’ use to ward off state encroachment. He dedicates whole chapters to show how high-altitude crop cultivation and slash-and-burn ‘swidden’ agriculture techniques allow hill people to maintain a lifestyle that makes capture both difficult and undesirable. But escape, when considered more generally, shows that production need not be the centerpiece of a way of life. Those who make evasion a way of life offer an image of existence that either fundamentally reshapes or even abandons the need for analyzing modes of production.

Now outmoded anthropological theories argue that the State is an inevitable and positive development that accompanies a natural drive among humans to increase their productive capacities. But there are peoples who have found that the plentitude of the earth can provide more than enough productive capacity to sustain life. Production is not the defining characteristic of these societies, but circulation. The primacy of production of any form only emerges from the State; so much so, that we can say that the State is not the result of a mode of production, but rather, it is the State that makes production a mode.

While States mutilate bodies to put them to work, societies of plentitude mark bodies to make the means of life circulate. Outside the State, marking bodies is not for displaying, but to circulate the means of life. Bodies are coded against temptation, which bans the immediate consumption of the earth but enables social connections. The marks that impose a ban on directly appropriating the means of life one helped secure (“you, as marked by this particular family line, can eat all except what your family have caught”) are the initiative that drive alliances with other lines of filiation. The State transforms this mode of circulation, which is enabled through direct mutilation of bodies, into a mode of production commanded by the terrifying voice of the despot. Further State advancements displace the actual marking of bodies (like slaves, who bore the marks not only of whipping, but sometimes branding) by moving the wound inward by creating psychic pain of bodies (national trauma). State production therefore changes the function of code from a direct code branded into the flesh of the body to an over-code of the written decree that introduces the voice of the despot in his absence. The State does not operate through group ritual of inscription, where the whole community would establish the gaze of authority by collectively watching a tattooing, but through a legion of bureaucrats that interpret the absent voice of the despot under the threat of death.

We can therefore make the following clarification: all societies are organized by anti-production, while only some are organized according to production. By anti-production, we mean the anticipation and warding off of certain forms of production. The paranoid chatter of managers, from kingly courts to the office buildings of bureaucrats, whose efforts are focused on predicting where the next challenge to power will come from. Slash-and-burn agriculture should be conceived of not as a mode of production, then, as it would look inferior to the the outside observer comparing it to the efficiencies of the wet-rice cultivation undertaken by a State down in the valley. Rather, as a type of anti-production, slash-and-burn agriculture is perfect tool for providing crops while discouraging capture and preventing a State from emerging.

Archaic State Pt. 6 Summoning the War Machine

Archaic State Pt. 6 Summoning the War Machine

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:38:31 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

Archaic State Pt. 6 Summoning the War Machine

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War is not always undertaken by States. This why the magician-king’s greatest illusion is war, which is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick.

At various times and places, war been primarily an anti-State force, dissolving them and dispersing power (Clastres, Archaeology of Violence). In fact, the original warrior is an outsider whose knows nothing about ruling the State, only its destruction. Yet war is rarely a whole way of life for these people, but rather the creation connections without the alliances, pacts, and bonds of the State. War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of these people, and it emerges only when their existence collides with their enemy (the State, the city, etc) (ATP: 417). It is rare for Archaic States to have war machines of their own (417-8). To wage war, then, the Archaic State must capture warriors from the outside, which it carefully does from a distance. The Archaic Sovereign summons its own war machine by mutilating these outsiders, ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (424-5). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war, but as the price for people to work. The State first gives them a wound that never heals, hurting them until the pain becomes a pleasant reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’. The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance, it appears as ‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle: pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified (424, 426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426).

Archaic State Pt. 5 The Magical Bond

Archaic State Pt. 5 The Magical Bond

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:32:45 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

Archaic State Pt. 5 The Magical Bond

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But what about the poles? someone interjected. You are right, the patient voice continued, let me return to the poles…

The Archaic State utilizes the first pole of sovereignty, the pole of conquest. Dumézil outlined the mythic origins of this pole, tracing it back to the figure of the magician-king. And, although Scott gives us a clear picture of the conquering king, he has only few remarks on the magic of the State. [[footnote: Scott’s analysis of millenarian religious movements and their prophecy-driven exoduses are provocative, but insufficient when compared to substantial works in cultural anthropology on religious reactions to statecraft.]]

One thing is clear: the conquerer does not succeed by might alone. Mythology provides a clear entry point for considering the role of magic in sovereign conquest. Romulus, for example, twice risks defeat after founding Rome. To ensure success, Romlulus invokes Jupiter, and after each victory he founds a cult and erects temple in thanks to Jupiter (M-V, 53-4). But Romulus does not invoke Mars, as would be appropriate for a warrior-chief. Rather, it is Jupiter, the god of State, who brings Romulus victory in two particular aspects: Jupiter as divine protector of regnum by arms, and Jupiter the great magician that performs “a sovereign conjuring trick” to break the morale of the enemy (55). By combining these two specifications of Jupiter, we know that the Archaic State captures by arms and by magic.

“The Binder” is another name for this magician-king. And it is binding that specifies the connection between their use of arms and magic. War may be chaotic, but sovereign wars of conquest are not without rules. In fact, wars are waged to establish a specific set of obligations: a nexum of bonds and debts (98). In contrast to pacts, which are made between equal-and-willing parties, the bond is a knot tied with force. The power of bonds, then, comes from both arms and magic. The substance of those bonds is a shifting economy of the repayment for hostility, the cost of a life, or any other means to bind and subjugate (98, 99). But the bond is cast by a dazzling sovereign; for instance, the one-eyed gods who raise their spear, not to fight, but to paralyze the enemy with fright (129, 139-40, 143). And the stupor continues far past the battle as the sovereign uses his terrifying magic to convert the loser’s fright into a bond that divides the victorious from the conquered (155). It is through the sting of defeat that the magician-king marshals his forces; capturing the vanquished, appropriating their power from afar, and commanding them with his terrifying magic.

The Feminist Critique of Microfinance

The Feminist Critique of Microfinance

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:17:25 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

The Feminist Critique of Microfinance

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Dear V, It was a pleasure presenting with you on Saturday night.

My research experience with microfinance comes mostly from a feminist perspective, in particular, feminist academic work that critically considers how “empowerment” rhetoric shapes global development.

The crux of the argument is that global governance now operates primarily according to “inclusion,” “participation,” and “empowerment.” However, it is not “no strings attached” inclusion, participation, and empowerment, but actually has a tight set of rules, all set up to extend the current global imbalances. For instance, look at how international debt relief under the Millennium Development Goals regime is just another way to expand Structural Adjustment Programs, while allowing nations like the US to look like saints. [AC: “Neoliberal Corn Laws“, if you will]

The most succinct statement of this principle, though in a domestic context, was published in Barbara Cruikshank in The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Cornell UP: 1999). Or, in an even more condensed summary, one could look to the second edition of Mitchell Dean’s bookGovernmentality, pages 82-88. If you would like copies of either of those texts, I would be more than willing to procure copies.

More recent work has extended this feminist argument into development studies. One short read, something I suggest for any NGO workers (such as I was for years, both as a community organizer and policy analyst), is Andrea Cornwall and Karen Brock’s “Beyond Buzzwords: ‘Poverty Reduction,’ ‘Participation,’ and ‘Empowerment’ in Development Policy”, which was turned into a United Nations Research Institute for Social Development paper available at http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/F25D3D6D27E2A1ACC12570CB002FFA9A/$file/cornwall.pdf.

I am also familiar with two recent academic papers that address the feminist concern over “empowerment” specifically in regards to microfinance. I highly suggest Josephine Lairap-Fonderson’s “The Disciplinary Power of Micro-credit: Examples from Kenya and Cameroon,” which comes from an excellent 2002 collection entitled Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Global/Local World, but have misplaced my version so I am unable to attach a copy.

And more recently, University of Minnesota Press has published an excellent feminist critique of microfinance in Bangladesh: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/microfinance-and-its-discontents

On a more positive note, while further economizing the lives of poor people is a dangerous path an unlikely to end poverty, there is hope in microfinance if it were to produce commonly-held resources that could slowly eclipse the currently existing pillars of privatized economic power. There are numerous examples of this sort of thing happening in the United States, most of them religious communities like the more fundamentalist variants of Mormonism, who hold their assets in common trust. [AC: A critical appraisal of the lasting political dimensions of American religious socialism is long overdue]

If you would like to chat about this, or any else, let me know.

Sincerely,

[There was bit a pushback after I called microfinance “greedy” “selfish” and “narcissistic” in my talk, a bit polemical I admit.. V asked me to provide her with my perspective on microfinance, because as a poverty activist she as so-far seen microfinance as one of the leading paths to poverty alleviation.]

Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty”

Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty”

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:52:39 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty”

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presented on April 14, 2012, as part of a joint Occupy/Justice Action Ministries panel discussion on poverty entitled “The Poor Can No Longer Afford the Rich.” [for my previous pieces of public scholarship i/r/t Occupy, look to Nightmares and Ghost Stories]

In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed.

HISTORY

The colonial conquest of the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, by European powers set up the structure of our current economic system.

History books have done a good job depicting the brutality of this period. In many places, Europeans wiped out 99% of the native populations. In places where the natives did survive, many of them were captured and made to do hard labor. In Potosi, Bolivia, for instance, native Bolivians were forced to work silver mines that snaked deep into the earth. So many miners died, that a popular saying goes “enough silver was taken from the mine in Potosi to build a bridge to Madrid, Spain, and if the bones of the dead miners were pulled from the bowels of the mine, one could build a bridge all the way back.”

Inside America, the deepest legacy of this colonial economic structure is an astronomical wealth gap between whites and blacks. The number to remember is 8%. For two-hundred years, when you stack up the average free black to the average white, the black only has 8% the wealth of the white. The number goes up, sometimes to 15%, and it goes down, like after the 2008 financial crisis, the average black household lost over half their collected wealth.

Abroad, the numbers are even more stark. The rich/poor gap has widened between both the global rich and the global poor. The ratio between the richest 20% and poorest 20% people was 30 to 1 in 1965, 41 to 1 in 1980, 60 to 1 in 1990, and 90 to 1 in 1997. The gap has also widened between the affluent countries and the poor countries. The ratio between the richest and poorest countries was 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973, and 72 to 1 in 1992.

Partly, this is because colonialism locked the status of certain countries in place. So, even as countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia were able to win political independence from European colonial powers, they were not freed of colonial economic obligations. The most notable example is Haiti, site of the world’s first successful slave revolution. To punish Haiti for winning the war, France demanded that the Haitians had to pay reparations to their oppressors, French slaveholders, for loss of profit. Haiti has been the poorest nation in the Americas ever since.

One-by-one, nations who fought hard to win against European domination became economically indebted to their oppressors in return for their independence. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, currently fund European development to the tune of $25,000 per minute, in loan repayments.

ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM

Given that few of us are influential policy makers, I would like to propose a more unconventional approach to addressing poverty. In particular, it addresses the essence of our lives as social and political beings: emotion.

Three basic human emotions motivate the current response to poverty. They are greed, fear, and pity.

Let me explain each one, beginning with greed.

Most of us try to consciously avoid being greedy. We offer to watch our neighbor’s kids, at the dinner table we let others go first, and we may even work jobs that pay less but feel more fulfilling. Yet, the prevailing economic theories presume that everyone acts greedy when it comes to money. And so goes the models behind policies of poverty alleviation: they appeal to people’s bald self-interest.

Fear is the next emotion.

Fear may be the most primal of human emotions, and it is the emotion most played by governments. Be afraid of “so-and-so”, they say, and we are. Economics has taken fear to a new level by categorizing things according to risk. Either risk for the investors, risk to the proprietors, or risk to the economy itself. Poverty relief even makes sense to these fearful individuals, because second to being afraid of losing their money and becoming a poor person, they are afraid of poor people themselves. Poverty relief for them, is insurance to keep people from threatening them or their investments.

And the last emotion is pity.

Pity is probably the most disgusting of human emotions. It is more self-serving than greed, and more patronizing than fear. When humans act out of pity, it is rarely for the benefit of the other person, but mostly to feel the rush of “being a good person.” As Oscar Wilde once wrote of the ‘man of great conscience’:

“They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised … charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.”

Rather than denouncing the “multitude of sins” found in current poverty alleviation found in micro-loans meant to play to one’s sense selfishness (what Americans entrepreneurship) or the indignities of charity drives like Live 8, let me suggest a few interesting avenues to alleviate poverty today.

1) solidarity economics

There is a growing variety of alternative economic approaches that fall under the umbrella title “solidarity economics.” They all follow the basic principle of cooperation rather than competition, and work to slowly transform the basic structure of economic activity without trying to immediately subvert it. You all have heard of the most famous form of solidarity economics, which goes under the name “fair trade.”

In addition, to fair trade, there has been a rising tide of cooperatives for working, buying, and selling; like cooperatively owned businesses, food coops, and farmers coops. In fact, the amount of worker-owned coops in the US has grown steadily, and a coop in Spain that employs over 80,000 workers has been around since 1956.

Even more common are small community-absed services where little-to-no money is exchanged. In some cases while no money is exchanged, they still measured work by labor, where anyone’s hour is worth the same as anyone else’s (MOMS SHARE), or community services. The general principles are “share, swap, barter” for collective living situations, toll-shares and barter clubs for clothing and consumables, and community resources like gardens and community-supported agriculture.

The leading criticism of this approach is that these communities are motivated primarily by fear, and in particular, fear of the other. that it creates small self-enclosed communities. For this approach to be truly successful, they have to grow from small sectors into a global network. Because, relocalized communities quickly become shelters for the residents, blocking out global problems but also global allies. Or to say it another way, how can we keep these small communities from being groups of people who have benefited from centuries of colonialism that have “cashed out” and secured themselves from dealing with the problems that face the rest of the world. [FEAR]

I therefore propose the “1 billion person” test. There are currently 1 billion people living in global slums, and there are currently 1 billion unemployed people. Any solution we come up to help ourselves must in some way also help those 1 billion people (and I don’t just mean the pitiful ‘we donate 1% of our proceeds to poverty relief”). If our solutions doesn’t bind us closer to those 1 billion people, then we are acting from positions of greed.

Ultimately, I think the 1 billlion test brings us to my most radical position. Rather than putting more of us to work (because, as Nietzsche says, “there’s no better police than work,” and most of us work too hard anyway), we should create a plan to free more and more of us from work. Only when humans live accordingly to truly free association and have no obligation to work will we triumph over pity and have created a form of freedom worth fighting for.

2) reparations & debt forgiveness

The historical imbalance left over from colonialism is making the world more unequal by the day. And, just as solidarity economics won’t work if only small groups do it, debt forgiveness, or worse yet, charity programs, are ineffective unless they wipe the slate clean.

Strangely enough, or less strange to those faith-based folks in the audience, the best example of debt forgiveness is from biblical jubilees. According to the historical materials, there are routine cycles of forgiveness, where no matter how bad your crime, debtors records gets wiped free every 7-15 years.

International debt forgiveness has been on the agenda many times before, and is being addressed piece-by-piece, but remains a low priority on the international agenda. Let’s look to Jubilee/ Jubilee 2000 (“millennium development goals”). Unfortunately, these initiatives are pursued as the grossed example of “greed” on the international scene. Countries looking to have their debts forgiven are seen as developmentally disabled countries that have had their growth stunted because they have fallen behind the United State and Europe. This narcissism, which assumes that the rest of the nations of the world will succeed if they look like us, is assured by putting massive restrictions on nations looking to have their debt forgiven, designed to always keep the rich nations on top.

3) reconsideration of property itself

Even if the slate is wiped clean, centuries of privation have upset the balance. The concentration of wealth and land has disrupted long-standing norms of reciprocity, ripping apart the social fabric of most of the world, replacing society with corporate and state-owned monopolies. Even if those monopolies forgive the rest of our debts, we would still exist as a large global class of the dispossessed.

I therefore propose a rethinking of property itself, and the social relations that they endanger. To begin, consider the three main versions of property, private, public, common. I think we all know what private property is. Public property is where resources are controlled by a state or institution that grants general access to a “public,” but with rules, and restrictions, and is still constituted on the basis of scarcity, which has to be carefully managed. Lastly, common property is property that is accessible to all and virtually inexhaustible. This may appear utopian, but there is an easy example. The human faculty of communication is held in common. No matter how much language is censored or trademarked, we find a way to use communication without exhausting to it, and actually adding to it in every instance of use. Following this model, we need to find out how to constitute our other social relations on the basis of a Common. It may begin with land reform, but it needs to end with detaching access from contribution, and making the whole basis of society on something Common.

Thank you for having me.

Archaic State Pt 4. A Misunderstanding

Archaic State Pt 4. A Misunderstanding

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 01:26:10 +0000 anarchistwithoutcontent

Archaic State Pt 4. A Misunderstanding

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The fundamental misunderstanding over the Archaic State is in regards to the type of conquest it undertakes. The conquest performed by the Archaic State is never a salt-the-earth war of annihilation but a process of capture. As the centrality of slavery in padi states indicates, if humans are the most precious resource, then lives should be preserved and not wasted, as they are a leading reason for waging war. Additionally, conquest is not an isolated act but an ongoing process. Bloody wars are not rare events locked away deep in the annals of the state but fuel the constant need for new labor. The Archaic State is driven by a cycle that follows the same dilations and contractions of a living system, with its own expanding and contracting organs. Therefore, the heart of the Archaic State of conquest is not powered by destruction, but a circuit of capture-exploit-release. It takes hostages, which it releases after they are used up.